sharing, on a pilgrims journey

I’ve quoted the famous song before… ‘I am what I am’… I’ve just been thinking about Pentecost (planning ahead!)…

Pentecost is a reminder for Christians to ‘be what they are’… we know we’re called as God’s people to be these enlivened, God-filled, God-minded, God-sighted, brave, disciples, with the same Spirit in us which raised Jesus from the dead… and yet so much of the time we wander around a if we were really purposeless members of a Sunday social club with no way to affect the real world at all…

What?!!! don’t we know who we are?

We’re like Fairytale characters or Disney characters in those famous plots where the Princess doesn’t know she’s a princess, or like Harry Potter who lives under the stairs oppressed, having no idea who he is. Thing is, they were those same beautiful/powerful people the whole time, they just didn’t realise, and therefore didn’t do anything about it.

In the same way, the church seems to have absolutely NO idea who we are… if we had a clue, we’d be making such a massive positive difference in our homes, communities, country, world… hey, even our churches would be transformed if we actually realised we were spirit-filled children of God…

this could change the world… if only we realised who we are and got on with being who God made us…

This week in Church, the bible readings are Psalm 23 and John 10, about God being our Shepherd, and Jesus saying he is our Good Shepherd.
I’ve been reading what Rabbi Harold Kushner says about Psalm 23 (well, he wrote a whole book about it!) and his writing is thought provoking. What particularly struck me is his thoughts around how the Psalm isn’t saying, ‘nothing bad will happen to us because we love God’, but that even when bad things happen, we won’t fear because God is with us.
Walking in the valley of the shadow is a common experience for many of us. Whether it’s the shadow of death, as for the Psalmist, or the shadow of long term pain, the shadow of depression, the shadow of other difficult times… the hope God offers is that ‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death (or whatever your valley of shadow is), I shall fear no evil for thou art with me…”
That’s the hope – that’s the certainty for those who know God – bad times will come, valleys of shadow will be part of our lives, but if we understand what it means to have God as our Good Shepherd, to know that God walks with us in the valley of the shadow… it can be transformed… even if it isn’t a place of endless light itself, eventually, with God, we know and we trust that we will come to the light again…